You Won't Drown But You Might Never Walk
19th Sunday of the Year
The Church teaches that virtues are habits of soul, formations of some part of our interior lives—our intellect, our will, our passions and emotions—that incline us toward something that is good. A person who possesses the virtue of courage finds it easier to perform actions that are brave, while someone who lacks the virtue of courage suffers from fear and anxiety. A person who possesses the virtue of temperance finds it easier to avoid drinking too much while someone who lacks the virtue of temperance probably needs to avoid bars and parties. Maybe this seems obvious to you, but to possess a virtue is to have more freedom than someone suffers under the grip of a vice. Virtues free us and vices make us slaves.
Most virtues are there for us to work on whenever we might wish. If you want to become more courageous, perform actions that are brave again and again and again and you will grow in virtue. If you want to do better with temperance, get to work and practice. The only way for us to form our intellect and will and passions and emotions is through practice, repetitive action: choice by choice, action by action, creating the kinds of habits in our interior lives that help us to want what is good.
There are some virtues, however, that we can’t just work on whenever we might wish. Some virtues start with God. The Church teaches that faith and hope and love are virtues given to us by God, infused into our souls at baptism, and inclining us to want for ourselves the greatest of all goods: relationship with Christ. We cannot create these virtues on our own, manufacture them by making certain kinds of choices or performing certain kinds of actions again and again and again. These virtues are supernatural—they come to us from God, or they do not come to us at all.
Faith is a virtue that we talk about regularly enough today. We talk about how people lack faith, or about how too many people possess a faith that is weak, not strong enough, and suffer from doubt. I think there is a question about faith that demands a good answer: if faith comes to us from God, if we can’t create faith or manufacture faith for ourselves, then why is faith stronger in some people than others? Why do some people possess the kind of faith that can move mountains while others lack faith completely? Is the problem with God? Does God give some people more of a virtue than others? Is He sometimes more generous, sometimes more miserly? Why is there a crisis of faith in the world? Why is there a crisis of faith in the Church?
I don’t think the problem is with God. I think the problem is with us. St. Thomas teaches that faith is a special kind of virtue because faith engages the whole of who we are as human persons. He says that faith is a virtue that first works on our intellect, on our mind—faith is first about what we think. A person who has faith thinks what is true and rejects what is false. But what the virtue of faith inclines us to think about is God, and the problem is that our intellect, our minds, simply aren’t powerful enough for us to understand God. We can’t think about God as true the way that we think a math formula written on the blackboard is true. And so, St. Thomas says that we need to use our will—our free will—to really possess the virtue of faith for ourselves. We need to make a choice for God.
St. Thomas, along with St. Augustine, and the whole tradition of the Church, call the choice we make for God ‘belief.’ St. Thomas says that belief is the act of faith. To believe is to ‘think with assent,’ which is to say, to believe is to use our free will to make a choice for something that is beyond our understanding—and Christ is beyond our understanding. We can’t make sense of Christ with our minds. The virtue of faith is given to us through our baptism, helping us to want a relationship with Christ. But we still need to do something with the faith given to us. We need to practice faith, strengthen faith, by making choices for Christ each day.
I think that in our Gospel today we see the virtue of faith at work in the life of Peter. Peter has been given the virtue of faith by God; he is inclined to want a relationship with Christ. Peter is starting to see in Christ something new, something not of this world. And the faith that Peter possesses has become so strong in him that when Christ appears on the Sea of Galilee, Peter becomes convinced that if Christ gives him the power, then he can walk on water. Can you imagine that kind of faith in your own life? The power to walk on water because of the faith you have in Christ?
So, Peter makes the choice to get out of the boat—and there is the act of belief, I think. There is no chance that at this moment Peter really understands what is happening or who Christ is or what Christ makes possible for us. The Truth of Christ is far beyond the power of Peter’s mind. But Peter gets off the boat anyway, and he walks toward Christ. And each step toward Christ is an act of faith, the act of belief, a choice Peter makes to use the free will given to him to close the gap between the limits of his understanding and the reality of Christ. With each step, the virtue of faith in Peter grows stronger, the desire in his heart for Christ becoming strengthened and fortified because Peter is doing something with the faith that God gave him. He gets to work. He practices.
Now, things do fall apart for Peter. He gets distracted. He notices the power of the wind, takes his eyes off Christ, and becomes afraid. He starts to doubt. Peter falls into the water. And Peter will continue to struggle with faith and belief for some time to come: sometimes expressing complete conviction that Christ is the Messiah and the Son of God, sometimes doubting the reality of Christ’s passion; sometimes standing by Christ, and sometimes denying him. But there is no doubt that Peter wants the kind of faith that engages the whole of who he is. The faith that Peter wants is not something that remains in the intellect alone, something mental, abstract, theoretical, something that Peter only thinks. Peter wants the kind of faith that requires choices, the use of his freedom, the kind of faith that requires action. Peter wants a faith that is alive.
St. Thomas teaches that a faith that remains in the intellect alone, something mental, abstract, theoretical, is a ‘lifeless faith.’ What he means with greatest depth of meaning for our Christian lives is that faith and charity must work together in us. We cannot allow our faith in Christ to remain something abstract and removed from the kind of life we are living. The faith we possess must be animated and vivified by the work of love.
But in a rudimentary, foundational way, to possess a lifeless faith is to possess a faith that is not strengthened by making the choice for Christ in moments of doubt or fear or anxiety or in the absence of understanding. To possess a faith that is lifeless is to possess a faith that is limited to what we think we can know or understand or make sense of. To possess a faith that is lifeless is to stay on the boat, to never try walking on water, to never risk falling into the water with the complete conviction that if you fall then Christ will catch you.
What I want to say is that we are confronted today with a crisis of faith in the world and in the Church because too many of us possess a faith that is lifeless, at least some of the time. Faith for us is limited to what we can understand, what we can know, what we can make sense of. We aren’t making the kinds of choices for Christ that we see Peter make in the Gospel today, using our free will to close the gap between the limits of our understanding and the reality of Christ.
Maybe you are suffering from some kind of broken desire, or from some kind of addiction, or from some kind of constant and repetitive sin that breaks your heart and makes every day into the kind of battle that calls into question the goodness of life. Maybe you look out at the world or at the state of the Church and what you see is so much uncertainty or violence or evil that your heart fills with fear and anxiety, causing you to despair and lose hope. Maybe you are in pain, combating some kind of illness, or have recently lost someone you love for no good reason and your suffering and your sorrow is seemingly more than you can bear.
These are the kinds of situations that cause people to lose faith in the world today. Some people think that our broken desires need to become a part of who we are to make life meaningful and worth living, and so demand that the Church change its teaching. Some people look out at the world or the Church with such a hopelessness about the future that they demand a return to the past to protect what is most true and good about Christ and the Christian life. Some people experience so much genuine suffering and sorrow in life that they start to doubt that God exists, or that God cares, or that our lives matter.
What I want to say is that most of us go through these kinds of movements in the life of faith. We suffer, we fear, we lose people who matter to us, we despair about the state of the world or the state of the Church. There is for the Christian the constant, continual temptation to possess a faith that is lifeless: a faith that is limited to what we can understand, what we can know, what we can make sense of. There is for the Christian the constant temptation to look for only practical solutions to our existential problems—wanting to change teaching, or hide within tradition, or give up on God—forgetting that Christ has made us promises: promises about what is possible for our lives, promises about eternity, promises about the life of the world and the life of the Church.
Those promises are more than we can understand, more than we can know, more than we can make sense of. There are moments in life when we find ourselves caught in a storm, the wind rises up, and the boat starts to take on water. And in those moments our instinct is to stay safe, to remain on the boat, maybe fighting over the direction we should steer or hiding under deck where we think it is safest or crippled with fear and anxiety doing nothing because these are the kinds of choices we can make sense of, the kinds of decisions we can understand. In those moments our instinct is to hold onto a faith that is lifeless. What we need to do is get off the boat, walk on the water, and move toward Christ.
Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 13th, 2023